Clapton (now Leyton) Orient pair epitomise the courage and sacrifice of the
footballing community throughout the First World War

Two brave men, Company Sergeant Major Richard McFadden and Private William Jonas, lay trapped in a trench at Delville Wood on July 27, 1916. This was the Great War at its muddiest and bloodiest, the close-quarter fighting relentless. Not for nothing did the soldiers call it Devil’s Wood.

McFadden and Jonas were team-mates at Clapton (now Leyton) Orient, professional footballers who played before huge crowds until enlisting. McFadden was a skilful, prolific inside-forward coveted by other clubs like Middlesbrough, who offered £2,000. McFadden was also famous for saving the lives of a drowning boy and a man in a burning house.

Jonas was another goalscoring attacker, a charismatic individual who attracted so many female admirers that Orient printed a note in the programme to point out he was happily married to a lady called Mary Jane.

These were public idols, strong men and long-term friends now engaged in a conflict on the Somme, enduring gassing, constant shelling, machine-gun fire, and the interminable lice that bred on their bodies.

Enlisted in the 17th Middlesex, the Footballers’ Battalion, they were under orders to clear Delville Wood of Germans.

The fighting inched back and forth and three weeks after General Haig launched the offensive, McFadden and Jonas found themselves pinned down, far from safety. They had to break out. “Goodbye Mac,” Jonas said.

“Best of luck. Special love to my sweetheart Mary Jane and best regards to the lads at Orient.”

What ensued next was related by McFadden in a mournful letter to Orient: “Before I could reply to him, he was up and over,” McFadden wrote. “No sooner had he jumped up out of the trench, my best friend of nearly 20 years was killed before my eyes. Words cannot express my feelings at this time.”

By the time the letter was circulated among the Orient faithful back home, McFadden himself was dead.

McFadden and Jonas were two of the first professional footballers to volunteer for duty. This year’s centenary of the start of the Great War will be marked by the footballing authorities, but back in 1914, football was slow to become involved with the war effort. In the week that hostilities were declared, one of the main items recorded in Preston North End’s board minutes was that “JJ Melling to be allowed to sell meat and potato pies’’ at Deepdale. Games continued.

As the 2nd Worcesters laid down their lives to prevent the annihilation of the British Expeditionary Force across the Channel, the FA came under increasing pressure to stop football. Before the Chelsea versus Arsenal game in December, men marched up and down outside Stamford Bridge with sandwich-boards declaring “Are You Forgetting That There’s A War On?”

According to those already at the Front, the soldiers were happy for games to go on back home. Many wrote to clubs and newspapers requesting news of matches. Football increasingly acknowledged its responsibilities to the nation. Arsenal players were working hard in the armaments factory in Woolwich. Recruiting officers were invited to games, putting up posters at Millwall saying “Let the enemy hear the Lion’s roar”.

English football was also embarrassed by the alacrity of their Scottish professional counterparts to volunteer, famously with “McRae’s Own”, the regiment heaving with Heart of Midlothian players mobilised by Colonel Sir George McRae and who were to fight so bravely at Contalmaison in General Haig’s Big Push of 1916.

Finally, at a meeting at Fulham Town Hall on Dec 15, 1914, the ultimate club versus country dispute was ended and the Footballers’ Battalion was formed.

The story is vividly told by Andrew Riddoch and John Kemp in “When The Whistle blows” (Haynes Publishing), including the moment when Lord Kinnaird, the FA chairman, addressed the footballers, beseeching them to enlist, an event of particular poignancy as he had learned one son had been killed at Ypres.

McFadden and Jonas followed their captain, Fred “Spider” Parker, on to the platform, signing up for the 17th Middlesex. Archie Needham of Brighton & Hove Albion stepped forward, willing to play “the greater game” in Flanders. So did Bradford City’s Frank Buckley, the England centre-half who played for both Manchester clubs and was to gain most renown as manager of Billy Wright at Wolverhampton Wanderers and of John Charles at Leeds United.

Arsenal’s assistant trainer, Tom Ratcliff, followed, so did nine more players from Clapton Orient, six from Croydon Common, three more from Brighton, three each from Chelsea and Watford, two each from Crystal Palace, Luton Town and Spurs, and one from Southend United. Other professionals joined other regiments.

Many never returned. The 17th Middlesex lost 900 men. They were gassed, bayoneted and mown down by machine guns. They felt the earth shudder as German miners exploded cavities crammed with explosives beneath them. Corporal Ben Butler of Queen’s Park Rangers lay in a makeshift hospital just behind the Front, telling the chaplain “no more football for me” before fading and dying.

A German shell dug a crater at Vimy Ridge, dragging solders like Private Frank Taylor of Northampton Town into the hole before the mud launched skyward, fell down and entombed a group of nine or 10. Private Angus Seed of Reading pulled Ratcliff clear. The body of Private John Williams was never found; his two previous teams, Millwall and Crystal Palace, staged a benefit match for his grieving widow and two bereft children.

At times, as the generals paused to study their maps, the exhausted footballing soldiers were drawn back from the Front, able to play matches on rutted fields, including one against the Royal Flying Corps.

The Memorial Cross to the 1914 Christmas Truce, near Ypres, Flanders

Many felt honoured to to share a field with Vivian Woodward, the great Spurs, Chelsea and England forward, who was eventually hit by grenade splinters at the Somme. He survived.

Major Buckley was also injured by a grenade at the Somme, meaning that increasing responsibility fell to Captain Edward Bell, formerly of Portsmouth and Southampton. Bell responded heroically, earning the Military Cross for having “repelled a counter-attack with great determination on another occasion he rescued several men from a blown-in dugout”. Bell was to die at the Somme two years later, killed by a shell.

On it went, the cruellest of concentrated conflicts, a few miles captured here, a few yards there, trench to trench. The footballers were next most seriously engaged at Guillemont, an innocuous-sounding name that involved walking into flying lead from German machine-gun posts. Shells landed around them, amongst them. The legs of the Aston Villa forward, William Gerrish, were riddled with shrapnel. He died.

Such was the withering fire and unyielding bombardment on Aug 8 1916 that the body of Oscar Linkson, the Manchester United full-back, was never located, an added trauma for his widow and distrait offspring. All that remains is his number, Private F/7123, and eternal recognition at the Thiepval Memorial.

On it went, peacetime icons making the ultimate sacrifice.

Reading’s Allen Foster fell under machine-gun fire. The England player, Evelyn Lintott, an FA Cup-winner with Bradford City and title-winner with QPR, lost his life serving the 1st Yorkshire on the first morning of the Somme offensive, July 1 1916. Walter Tull, a distinguished inside-forward at Spurs and Northampton, suffered from shell-shock, and then died while with the 23rd Middlesex, his body never found.

So many players were involved. Fred Osborn, Preston’s leading goalscorer in the two seasons before the War, got a bullet hole so big in his thigh “you could nearly get your hand in”. Plymouth Argyle’s James McCormick had his forehead blown off, a large flap of skin almost obscuring his vision.

Fred Keenor, the Cardiff City defender, was injured at the Somme but recovered and went on to accept the FA Cup from King George V at Wembley in 1927, as well as representing Wales 32 times. Joe Bailey, who earned a DSO and Military Cross, went on to become a popular post-war figure at Reading.

Many performed heroic acts. Donald Bell of Bradford Park Avenue won the Victoria Cross for loading up with grenades, climbing out of his trench and neutralising a German machine-gun nest on the Somme in 1916. He died five days later, trying to silence another post, a location renamed Bell’s Redoubt. Bernard Vann, an amateur centre-forward with Derby County, was awarded the Victoria Cross in 1918 for sustained bravery guiding his battalion across the Canal du Nord to attack the enemy. Shortly before the ceasefire, Vann was killed by a German sniper.

Orient suffered greatly. When the versatile George Scott, as adept in midfield as at centre-half, died at the Somme, Arsenal wrote to Orient, referring back to some of the great games they played against Scott, McFadden and Jonas.

Arsenal even published a tribute that serves well for all footballers who served their country in the Great War: “In civil life they were heroes and they proved themselves heroes on the battlefield.”